


magdalena

by blujamas



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst, F/M, Philippine Setting, Slow Burn, Surgeon!Clarke, salt so much salt, soldier!bellamy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 03:17:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12879063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blujamas/pseuds/blujamas
Summary: The year is 1942. The place is San Mariano, Philippines. The war will start with Clark Air Field and end with the deaths of millions. But Bellamy Blake doesn't know that yet. All he knows is that the Japanese is marching towards them, his sister is missing, and these newcomers seem to be his only hope for a family. But with a noose tightening around his neck, Bellamy must put country and people over everything else - even his heart.Even Clarke Griffin.





	magdalena

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: The story will be mostly in English for convenience, but some Filipino phrases will be sprinkled in here and there. The 20th century was not kind to many people and for the purpose of historical accuracy and to tell my people's side of the story, this story may contain heavy topics and casual sexism/racism. I will set some limits, however. 
> 
> The chapter titles are taken from Gloc 9's song, Magda. <3

“Blake, Bellamy.”

Bellamy felt the eyes of the other prisoners on him as he walked up to the desk. He kept his back straight under the weight of their stares and the questions hidden behind them. _That’s a white man's name,_ they were thinking, _so what’s he doing with brown skin_? Bellamy shrugged off their queries like a dirty coat. He couldn’t give them the man who’d given him his name or the woman who’d given him her skin, and he’d only be left to wonder along with them if he stopped to think about it too much.

There were about twenty others in the dark-paneled room with him, all looking as young as he was – some even younger still. They stood along the far wall near the windows propped open to let in the smell of the countryside – and the blood from the nearby camp. The Japanese had taken most of the other towns in the region, but not San Mariano. At least not yet. The higher-ups were desperate, because they knew the Japanese were coming and the vanguard was falling, and so that was why Bellamy was here.

They’d taken out prisoners from the local jail to fight in the battalion. Of course, Bellamy would probably be dead within two seconds with a gun in his hands, but that was better than rotting away in a dingy prison cell for the rest of his life or getting hanged to make space for another petty sap whose only fault was trying to survive. He didn’t want to think about where he would be now if he’d stayed in his cell. The Japanese would take this town soon enough. He would’ve been found in his cell and killed without ever seeing O again.  

Every way he looked for choices, it always ended up with him dying. Might as well die fighting and with the slimmest chance to find O than none at all.

The wooden floorboards creaked under every step but finally he reached the front of the tiny hut the army had commandeered for “government purposes.” He wondered where the original owners were, if they were even still alive. He knew the Americans were less ruthless than the previous ones who'd taken hold of his country, but colonizers were still colonizers, no matter how pretty the packaging.

“I’m Bellamy,” he said to the woman behind the desk. She was an American in a dark-green uniform, with brown hair spilling out of her cap. “Bellamy Blake.”

She smiled at him, which was unusual. Usually, when a Filipino introduced himself with a name like that, he’d get tossed to the ground and asked where his loyalties lied. Another question he couldn’t answer.

“Hello, Bellamy. My name is Gina, I’m the San Mariano battalion’s glorified secretary.” She wrote down something on the stack of paper she’d been working on for the past hour and then handed a sheet to him. “Write down your basic information, and you’ll start duty tomorrow.”

"'Glorified secretary?'" Bellamy repeated with a wry smile.

"I'm a busy woman," Gina said, feigning irritation but not managing to hide an answering grin.

Bellamy reached for the paper the same time the door of the hut creaked open. An black-haired American soldier ran in, looking around wildly until he found Gina.

Gina stood, the hardened seriousness of a soldier replacing her cool good humor. She told Bellamy to keep calm as the soldier ran towards the desk, ignoring the murmuring that had started up with his grand entrance.

“Murphy,” said Gina in lieu of greeting.

“I need ten men,” Murphy replied curtly. His eyes fell on Bellamy. “You. Pick nine others and meet me at the base.”

“I don’t start until tomorrow,” Bellamy said.

Murphy scoffed, looking at him with the same look of distaste Bellamy had gotten his entire life. “Change of plans, rookie. You start today. A Japanese spy was caught around base – and he’s holding our Chief Surgeon hostage in the woods. We need all hands on deck. You have five minutes.”

 

* * *

 

 

The tip of the scalpel dug painfully into the skin of Clarke's neck. Not hard enough to draw blood, but one wrong move and Clarke would be bleeding out on the forest floor. She'd die in this forgotten part of the Philippines all because she wanted to play doctor.

 _Don't think like that,_ she thought, digging her fingers into the spy's arm, desperately trying to give herself room to breathe without skewering herself on her own scalpel. _You’re better than this._

Her boots skidded against the leaves as the Japanese spy pulled her along deeper into the woods, barking harsh one-word orders in her ear. He was breathing hard. Perhaps he hadn't expected to get caught so soon, and by a woman at that. She'd been alone in the medical tent, sorting out the supply cabinet. She remembered thinking about home and where Wells could be stationed. The war had only started a few weeks ago, but it already felt like forever, and all she wanted was to be back in New York, laughing with her best friend and drinking bitter tea with her mother and spending lazy afternoons in her fiancé's loft. Dissatisfied and bothered by the heat, she'd slammed the glass cabinet closed a little too hard, and that's when she saw him – in the reflection on the glass, halfway into the tent. There was a brief moment when they just stared at each other, confused, and then Clarke had shouted for help. There was a soldier wandering about the tent just then, and he managed to disarm the spy's gun before getting himself killed. Unfortunately, that left Clarke the only hostage he had if he wanted to get out of the camp alive. So he'd taken a scalpel from the table beside one of the cots and led Clarke out of tent at scalpel-point.

She wished she could say she hadn't gone with a fight, but she'd only managed a small scuffle before the spy had her by the hair and was using her to get out of the camp without anyone trying to shoot him.

And how could they? She was their only surgeon. The San Mariano base wasn’t a priority and they'd only been awarded one surgeon, two nurses, and two engineers. If she died then (or now, she supposed), the base would be severely compromised.

She just hoped the spy didn't know that, too.

“Okay,” he breathed into her ear in a thick Japanese accent. “We’re far. They will not find us.”

If only he knew how desperate the camp was to get her back. Playing doctor may have gotten her into this, but it would also get her out. She was invaluable. They would send for her. She had to hold on to that no matter what. Hopelessness was not an option – Clarke knew enough of war to know that that was what got you killed in the end.

The spy pushed her down into the ground and pulled out a roll of rope from his pocket. “Tree,” he directed. When Clarke merely stared at him, he grabbed her roughly by the hair and pulled her through the dirt to the nearest tree. He tied her flush against the trunk, her arms pulled painfully backwards until he could tie them to each other, securing her to the tree.

Satisfied with his work, he sat in front of her, close enough that Clarke couldn’t move an inch without him noticing. He looked her up and down, once, and then nodded to himself. Without the threat of getting stabbed to death, Clarke’s mind stopped racing for once to finally realize how young her captor was.

A teenager. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

“You’re young,” she said, unable to stop herself.

“So are you,” he snapped. “Shut your mouth.” He took out a tiny leather-bound book from the inside of his coat and began flipping through it. Clarke saw maps and large blocks of text in Japanese and understood that he was just as lost as she was.

As he worked, Clarke looked around. Nothing distinguished this part of the forest from the rest of it:  there were trees and underbrush and birds. _So many birds_. Realization dawned slowly on Clarke.

They would never find her.

 _No,_ she thought violently, trying to see through the foliage above. _They will. They have to._ The engineers were smarter than anyone else she knew, even the engineers she’d known in her first battalion in the US, and Murphy – bless his weasel heart – would never let any Japanese soldier slip past his guard. And her mother… Her mother would never let them stop trying to find her.

But her mother wasn’t here. She was in the field, with the general. They’d trusted her with the base and she’d gotten herself _kidnapped_. San Mariano was her first responsibility, however unofficial it was, and she’d failed. More than that, she’d probably die out here. If not from the scalpel, then by the forest.

The sun was setting. The sky she saw through the foliage was a deep scarlet – sunset. She didn’t have much time left before the forest was teeming with beasts. She wasn’t familiar with Philippine predators, but her imagination provided her with enough images to know that she didn’t want to be caught out here in the dark.

 _Think, Clarke, think_. She pulled on her bonds. No good. She glanced at the spy. Still as lost as she was, judging from the crease of his brow as he skimmed through the book of maps. She calculated how much time had passed between now and from when she’d been taken from the base. Thirty minutes, at least. They would be scouring the forest for her now – but none of them knew this forest enough to ensure they wouldn’t get lost along with her, not without a sign.

Which left Clarke Griffin, Head Surgeon and kidnap victim/hostage, only one call.

Like she did in the tent, all she could do was scream.

 

* * *

 

“Her name is Clarke Griffin,” Murphy said as he paced in front of the recruits.

Bellamy stared the woman in the picture he’d been handed. When they’d told him he’d be looking for the camp’s head surgeon, he’d expected to be looking for a craggy old bastard already doddering off to his grave – someone he wouldn’t trust with a scalpel within a mile around him. He wasn’t sure he could trust _her_ either.

She was just so… well, _young_. The picture was of a young woman with short, wavy hair leaning against a tank. She was wearing a buttoned dress that Bellamy knew was the fashion overseas, and she was laughing – eyes closed, arms a blur of motion. There were two men with her in soldiers’ uniforms – one who looked much like Murphy with tussled black hair and pale skin; the other more darker-skinned than even Bellamy, his arm around the woman who was, apparently, the Head Surgeon of the San Mariano base.

One of the other searchers, a small slip of a thing with spindly arms asked, “Are you sure we’re not looking for someone else? All this for one girl?”

Murphy found him in the crowd and glared him down. “Did I bloody stutter, rookie?” When the boy shrunk into himself like a wilting flower, Murphy continued, “Clarke Griffin is the general’s little princess. She’s valued not just by the people she’s stitched back together, but by the general and his personal adviser and chief surgeon, Abigail Griffin.”

Bellamy passed the photo along to the boy next to him and tried to shake the image of that laughing girl out of his mind. “We’re supposed to find that ‘little princess’ out there in _that_ forest?” He pointed to the large expanse of woods near the base. Even years of hunting hadn’t gotten him halfway through with that ground. “They could be anywhere.”

“Well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Murphy said roughly, looking out at them all. There were the ten from the prison cells and twenty others from the camp. Overall, they totalled to ‘not enough.’ “We have to retrieve Clarke Griffin, _alive_ , or the general will skin us all alive and parade our sorry hides around on poles – and that’s not including what the Doc will do.”

“We shouldn’t waste any more time,” someone – an American soldier – piped up from the back. “The sun’s setting. She could get eaten by wolves.”

“There aren’t any wolves in the Philippines, you dolt.” This came from Reyes, one of the engineers of the camp. She was standing apart from the group, her eyes wary. She was covered in oil and dirt, and the look she shot every man around her was filthier still. She didn’t trust any of them, not even the ones from her camp, to find her friend. It was evident, at least to Bellamy. He knew a thing or two about not trusting anyone else with the people he loved. “But the dolt is right. We’re losing time. Murphy, damn it, why did it take you so long to get help?”

“Whatever, Reyes,” Murphy spat.

Reyes ignored him and addressed Bellamy. Somehow, during the few minutes it had taken to assemble this ragtag group, Bellamy had become its de facto leader. “Blake, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “She’s a fighter, but she can’t hold out long with supplies or a sharp enough weapon. Bring Clarke home.”

Bellamy hadn’t recovered yet from the shock of being addressed to with such authority before Reyes turned on her heels and walked past the gates of the San Mariano base. ‘Gates’ was being kind to it – having been taken by surprise, all the Americans could put together was a haphazard imitation of fences out of scrap metal and whatever they could find in the woods. _Stole from us again, didn’t you?_ Bellamy thought bitterly, looking around at the trees near the base with their branches shorn off.

“Blake.” It was Murphy, with that same sour look he’d maintained for the past quarter-hour. “Go. Don’t come back without Griffin.”

Bellamy nodded, blood boiling. How many times would he have to continue taking orders? He’d been following rules all his life, and when he’d broken them _once_ , he’d been sent to rot in jail and then handed over to the very people who took his country away from him.

It wasn’t fair.

But then again, nothing was – in love and war.

Without much of a choice, he gestured towards the part of the woods where the spy had disappeared with the surgeon and said, “Let’s go.”

When they got to the edge of the forest, Bellamy stooped down to inspect the ground. There. Track marks through the leaves that had fallen off the trees. He turned around and realized everyone – even the Americans – had stopped behind him, wide-eyed and waiting orders.

Feeling like he was wearing a part that was way too big on him, he said, “Alright. Break off into ten groups, three people each. That way, we can cover more ground. You, you and you, pick a team and head north; you and you, south; you…” He continued until they were neatly ordered, and then waited for them to form their groups.

They did as they were told like a rusty machine. The boys from the jail didn’t want anything to do with the American soldiers, and vice versa. Bellamy sighed as they started breaking off into the woods in groups of three – three groups of all-Filipinos and six groups of all-Americans. That left him with two American soldiers.

One of the boys from the photo was one of them. The white one. He was hard-eyed and hard-jawed, his shoulders set like stone. He was way too high-strung to be worried about just another colleague and, judging by what Bellamy could remember of the photo and how this guy had looked at Griffin… well. Perhaps he was looking at the Head Surgeon’s boyfriend.

The other one was a tall, scrawny kid who looked way to excited to be traipsing through the forest at sunset. He held his gun almost as if he was planning on swinging it around like a baton, and he had goggles on his head like those pilots that had come through town a few months ago.

“We take this way,” Bellamy said, pointing to the place where the track had vanished. “This is the likeliest place they headed.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” said the excitable one, grinning from ear to ear and bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Okay, cool, off to look for Mama Clarke. Good.”

“Jasper Jordan,” the other American drawled. “Are you fucking _high_?”

Apparently-Jasper looked aghast at the very notion. “Me? High? At a time of crisis and great stress? A life-or-death scenario with high stakes? Me – yeah, I’m high. Stop looking at me like that, Collins.”

Apparently-Collins started to say something else, but Bellamy cut in. “I don’t give a shit if he’s high, we have to go.”

Collins nodded gravely. “I’ll lead the way,” he said.

Bellamy raised an eyebrow at him and his freshly-polished boots and newly-pressed uniform. “You? No. I know these woods better than anyone. For once, _you_ follow _me_.”

The sour look on Collins’s face matched Murphy’s, but he didn’t argue any further. Surprised that worked for once, Bellamy started leading the way deeper into the forest.

They’d given him a small gun – a pistol, Gina had called it – when he’d been enlisted, and it was a foreign weight in his hands as he pushed through the low-hanging branches of the forest, looking around for signs of struggle. There was a broken twig just above his head and – there. The tracks on the ground had started up again.

Reyes was right. Clarke Griffin was a fighter. The spy practically _dragged_ her away from camp.

Bellamy followed the impressions of boots on the ground until they disappeared again, then looked for more clues. Upset underbrush, disturbed rocks – anything. He’d been hunting all his life and this was second nature to him, but the woods around him were getting less and less familiar with every step he took.

Jasper was giggling behind him and he could practically feel Collins’s apprehension in the air, but Bellamy focused on his work. That was something O was always praising him for. His focus.

‘You get this look on your face,’ she’d told him once, scrunching up her small face in some vague approximation of what Bellamy’s face was apparently like when he was focused. ‘Like this. Like you hate everyone and everything around you.’

‘I don’t hate _you_ ,’ he’d replied.

‘I know,’ she said knowingly. ‘I don’t hate you, either, Bell.’

That was the closest they’d come to love.

Thinking about O made his stomach turn, but Bellamy ignored that, too. He spotted scratch marks on one of the tree trunks and followed its path around to the left, and that was when he heard the scream.

“Clarke!” Collins shouted back, like an idiot, because _of fucking course._

Bellamy clamped his hand down on Collins’s mouth and pushed him against the tree, looking around them for any sign of an ambush. Jasper had brandished his gun. He wasn’t laughing now.

Collins struggled against Bellamy’s grip until Bellamy let him go, satisfied the spy hadn’t heard Collins’s stupid proclamation.

“What the hell?” Collins demanded, shoving Bellamy backwards with fire in his eyes.

“Are you _trying_ to get us killed?” Bellamy hissed. “Hey, here’s an idea, moron, maybe shout a little bit louder because I don’t think they heard you back in Kyoto.”

“How would you know where Kyoto is?” Collins spat.

“I’m a survivor, Joe, that’s what I do,” Bellamy replied. “I know, I adapt, I survive. You wouldn’t understand that, though.” Before Collins could reply, Bellamy walked to Jordan and plucked the gun out of his hands.

“Whoa!” Jordan argued.

“I don’t trust you with this,” said Bellamy. He traded him his pistol. “Here. Keep it pointed _away_ from your comrades next time. We move forward. That shout came from somewhere here. Follow me.”

Years of hunting down animals that were easily-spooked had made Bellamy’s footsteps feather-light, but Jordan and Collins’s bulky boots broke leaves and snapped twigs no matter how they tried. Bellamy prayed the princess’ captor was too busy doing damage control to notice them creeping up on—

_Clarke Griffin._

Through the break in the trees, he could see her. She looked just like she did in the photo, and just as stubborn as Reyes described. She was tied to a tree in a clearing, glaring defiantly up at someone who was yelling in rapid-fire Japanese, their voice cracking with panic.

“Clarke,” Collins breathed. Bellamy felt him start to move and whipped around to push Collins back.

“You stay here,” Bellamy snapped. “You’re a risk factor I can’t control. If anything happens to the princess, it’ll be _my_ head to roll, like always, so you sit here and babysit Jordan while I go think our way out of this mess.”

“She’s _my_ responsibility,” Collins argued.

“No, she isn’t,” Bellamy spat back. “Step back. You have to trust me, Joe.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Can’t remember your name,” Bellamy said. “Sit still. I have an idea and I can’t pull it off if I have to think about _your_ noisy ass, too. Do you want me to save your girlfriend or not?”

Collins glared at him for a long while before nodding. Bellamy couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t protested on the ‘girlfriend’ bit, which proved his suspicions. Collins was too close to this girl to be much help. Bellamy had to do this himself.

He looked up through the foliage. The starts were coming out. The sky was part-night, part-scarlet. If he wanted to save Clarke Griffin _and_ get them all back home before something worse than a Japanese spy hunted them down, then he’d have to move quick. He left a seething Collins with Jordan, who had gone very still, staring wide-eyed through the trunks at Clarke Griffin.

“I’ll be back,” said Bellamy, crouching low.

“Not without her,” Collins reminded.

Bellamy nodded, and was gone.

 

* * *

 

Clarke Griffin knew that there was a very big probability that the spy was going to kill her. He was shouting at her in Japanese, forgetting in his anger that she couldn’t understand him. She pulled at her hands again, hard enough to draw blood from her wrists, and it hurt like hell but there was no way she was going down without a fight this time.

She was Clarke fucking Griffin, and she didn’t come from halfway around the world to get killed with her hands behind her back.

The spy finally stopped his tirade, breathing heavily. He seemed to realize then that if Clarke’s scream hadn’t attracted anyone, then his two-minute long monologue would have. Clarke tried to hide a smirk and failed.

“Bloody Christ,” she said. “You really are just a child.”

“I’m no child,” he growled, in English, and lunged for her with the scalpel.

Clarke turned her head just in time, and the scalpel lodged itself into the tree right beside her ear. Without waiting for the spy to recover, she twisted her legs around his torso and bucked, knocking him to the ground on his back. The scalpel was still in the tree, so Clarke turned her head again and, using her teeth, pulled it free.

Now, the tricky part. Adrenaline pumped  through her veins, hard enough that she could barely hear anything beyond her own harsh breathing and the ringing in her ears. She ignored everything, ignored how much time she had left before the spy would be back on his feet, and spat the scalpel behind her.

Her hands patted the ground desperately, looking for the hilt. When her fingers met only damp leaves, her heart fell – and then there it was, the cool, familiar blade, grazing her left pinky finger as if in greeting. She inched the scalpel nearer with her fingers, craning her neck back to see as far as she could, and finally managed to place the scalpel in her hands. Clarke barely suppressed a sigh of relief as she began sawing at her bonds.

That was when the spy, groaning from Clarke’s blow to his stomach, got to his knees, his arms around his middle. He was muttering something too low for her to hear – curses, no doubt – as he unsteadily tried to stand over her.

Clarke’s legs snapped out again, but with her hands busy and the spy already anticipating her attack, she barely grazed his shoulder before he caught her ankle with his hands and glared down at her with a vicious fire burning in his eyes.

And that was when the bonds snapped free.

With a feral scream, Clarke kicked her way out of his grip and rolled over, bring the scalpel down on an arc and into his leg. It hit home, and the spy fell back down to his knees with a shriek.

Clarke scrambled to her feet, ignoring the salty tang of blood in her mouth. He would not catch her. She wouldn’t let him. He was shouting at her, but with that scalpel lodged at _just the right place_ , he wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

Clarke began running. She couldn’t breathe – it was so hard to, like swallowing down shards of glass, but she was going to run, damn it, because she would not die here, not now. Her feet were aching, her arms burning, and exhaustion had settled deep into her bones. But she ran.

And that was when she saw him, emerging from the shadows with a gun pointed straight at her.

“Get down,” he growled.

 _No, no, no_ – she didn’t fight so hard just to be cornered again.

“Please,” she said. It was all she _could_ say.

“I said _get down!_ ” The force of his words made her knees, exhausted from the fight, finally crumple. She fell.

And he pulled the trigger.

 

* * *

 

Bellamy Blake had seen a lot of odd things in his life. There was that one night, when the stars started falling and he’d thought it was the end of the world. Then he’d seen O, when she was barely six, scale a tree tall enough that the older kids couldn’t even climb halfway up. He’d once gotten glimpse of a horse so big it would’ve crushed him effortlessly under one hoof. He’d seen the beginning of the war, had heard stories of the first one that were too whimsical to have been true. He’d been told stories of fairies and witches whose severed, winged torsos hunted down pregnant women.

But he had never, not once, seen something as strange as it was delightful as watching Clarke Griffin, Head Surgeon and small woman, take down a military-trained spy with her hands literally tied behind her back.

He sat there, between two trees and in front of a bush, as Clarke Griffin kicked the spy down. He heard Collins scream from where he’d left them, but it appeared as if neither Clarke nor the spy had noticed.

She couldn’t survive long. The spy was already getting up, and there was no way she could get free of the rope tying her to the tree. Bellamy stood, heading to help her, and that was when something flashed in her hands, glowing silver in the new moonlight, and she’d buried a scalpel into the spy’s leg, right over where even Bellamy knew would hurt like all hell.

 _Holy shit_ , Bellamy thought, his mouth falling open. _Holy shit!_

Clarke began running towards his direction, not once looking back. She was halfway through the clearing when the spy, with a strangled yell, pulled the scalpel free of his leg and limped after her.

He was faster than Bellamy would’ve given him credit for, especially with that wound, trailing blood across the forest floor. And Clarke was exhausted, too. She was, after all that, still human, despite what Bellamy wanted to believe. Before long, the spy was almost on her, and Clarke Griffin hadn’t noticed—

Bellamy broke free from the trees. Clarke skidded to a halt, her eyes wide. They were green.

 _Huh,_ Bellamy thought. _It suits her_.

“Get down!” he shouted, desperate. The spy was right behind her—

“Please,” she whimpered. She was not afraid, just tired.

Fear twisted in Bellamy’s gut as the spy raised the scalpel over his head, running straight at Clarke.

“I said _get down_!” he screamed, desperation knotting his words until they were almost unrecognizable.

Clarke dropped to her knees, and Bellamy pulled the trigger.

The shot rang out, louder than he’d expected, and for a moment there was just that ringing in his ears and the tremble of his fingers.

He’d never fired a gun before.

He knew how to load it. He’d been watching the soldiers all his life. But he’d never fired one.

Until now.

Clarke was looking up at him, terror in her eyes and her hands instinctively at her ears. He didn’t like seeing her afraid of him, not after she’d just faced down a spy with her hands tied and with nothing but a scalpel.

“Who…” She looked slowly behind her, and scrambled away from the sight of the spy, lying lifeless on the ground, the blood pooling around his head like a blooming red flower. “Oh, Christ,” Clarke whispered, her voice sounding fragile. “Oh, what have I done?”

“You didn’t do anything,” Bellamy said. His mouth tasted strange, as if he’d just inhaled a glass full of ashes. He ignored the unsteadiness of his own feet and offered Clarke a hand, not taking his eyes off the corpse.

Corpse. He was young. Too young. Younger than even O had been, before she’d disappeared. And Bellamy had killed him, shot him through the head—

A cold hand wrapped around Bellamy’s own, bringing him back to his mission. Why he was here in the first place. Clarke Griffin. She was staring up at him, her mouth slightly open as if she was trying to make sense of him.

“Aren’t you going to help me up?” she said.

Bellamy pulled, and she rose to her feet. She glanced back at the body, and when she turned to Bellamy, her face was soft. She was older than the picture had made her out to be, probably early twenties. Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Right around Bellamy’s age.

“We should give him a proper burial,” she said.

Bellamy looked up at the sky. The stars were out in full, and so was the moon. Something howled in the distance. The ringing in his ears was replaced by the insistent screaming of the crickets of the forest.

Bellamy shook her head, feeling his muscles tighten at the thought of having to touch a body he’d just put a bullet through. Bile rose to his throat, but he pushed it down forcibly as he looked back at Clarke.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “I need to take you home.”

“But—” Clarke gestured vaguely, trying to find her point. “He deserves at least a prayer, don’t you think?”

“He held you hostage,” Bellamy pointed out, more to himself than to her. “He almost _killed you_. And you want to pray for him?”

Clarke set her jaw stubbornly. He had a sense that that was how her face was usually arranged. “It’s the least I could do.”

Bellamy shook his head.

“Clarke!” Collins suddenly burst out of the underbrush, a tussled-haired Jordan following unsteadily behind him.

“Finn?” Clarke barely managed before Collins caught her by the waist and pulled her close, burying his face in his neck. She couldn’t have smelled that good, after almost an hour getting dragged through the forest, but Collins inhaled her scent as if she was doused with the best perfume in the world.

Clarke’s arms went around him almost instinctively, and they held on to each other for dear life.

Jordan stumbled towards Bellamy, his wide dark eyes on the corpse of the young spy. “Man,” he said. “You – You _killed_ –”

“It’s war, soldier,” Bellamy said, but it felt like a lie. It wasn’t supposed to be war, not for him. “I thought you of all people would understand that.” He slung the gun off his shoulder and tossed it to Jordan. “Let’s go!” he called out, and Clarke and Collins sprung apart as if he’d just tossed them a grenade. He took one last look at the corpse before leading the way out of the forest, not looking back once.

* * *

 

 

They told her his name. _Bellamy Blake_ , whispered Finn, carefully, almost as if saying his name out loud will make him disappear. He certainly felt like a dream. He walked ahead of them, his footfalls silent and sure as if he’d already carved his way through this forest a million times and was simply bored of the act, though the tenseness of his shoulders would suggest differently. If Clarke squinted at just the right angle, he almost disappeared into the trees like a ghost, as if the woods were the true home of his soul and this human form was merely a disguise.

Clarke had heard stories like that before, from some of the children in the town that had not yet been discouraged to talk to “that yellow-haired American lady.” One of her favorites was of Maria Makiling, a goddess who lived in a hut deep in the forest and ruled every tree and rock and drop of water. She was said to be generous and fair, with hair as black as night, and whose name alone could stop storms. _Bellamy Blake_ sounded like a name powerful enough to go against the rule of nature, and if Clarke hadn’t left all her painting tools behind when she packed for war, she would’ve painted the both of them – Bellamy Blake and Maria Makiling – their dark edges blurring into the green backdrop of a Philippine woodland.

 _Deities,_ she would call the painting. Or maybe _Saviors._

As they walked through the forest, Clarke found herself unable to say two simple words. _Thank you._ Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for coming for me. Thank you, Bellamy Blake. They were necessary, and it was what had to be said, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The words stuck in her throat every time she dared speak them, and eventually the silence got so heavy that she could barely hear herself think.

Bellamy had warned them not to speak unless absolutely necessary. The woods were getting darker around them and every sound apart from their footsteps was a potential predator on the hunt. Despite Bellamy’s earlier incentive to go ahead, he now hung back with them, as if unknowingly trying to protect them. They moved forward like a pack, Bellamy ahead, Finn behind, and Jasper and Clarke in between. Clarke’s knees were still shaky from the fight, and she couldn’t wish away the image of the dead boy in the clearing, but she found herself placing one foot over the other without much doubt over the places where Bellamy’s feet had been.

He was not a soldier – at least not yet. Finn had given her a brief rundown and she knew Bellamy was more civilian than fighter. They were supposed to be protecting _him_ , not the other way around.

A howl sounded in the distance, and the four of them froze, looking to one another.

“Blake?” Finn said. Somewhere along the way, Bellamy had become the de facto encyclopaedia.

“That didn’t sound near,” Bellamy replied curtly, but hurried his steps.

They cut through underbrush and pried branches up to duck underneath them. It felt like hours, but Clarke knew it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes.

“Are we lost?” Finn asked irritably after a few seconds. “This seems farther than the way we took to find Clarke.”

“We’re taking a detour, Joe,” Bellamy replied breezily without turning or stopping. “That place we went through before is full of nocturnal snakes. They’d be awake at this hour, no doubt out on the hunt. Can’t have Miss Griffin dying of a venomous bite after I went through all that trouble to save her.”

“How do you even know all this?” Clarke asked, the first thing she’d addressed to him in a while. She ignored his surprise at the sound of her voice. “How do you know they’re even venomous?”

In the dark, Clarke couldn’t be sure, but Bellamy’s jaw seemed to have tightened at her question. “Experience,” he replied vaguely.

They didn’t ask him any more after that.

Two minutes later, Jasper said, “Wait. Snakes are _near our camp?_ ”

“Don’t worry, Joe Jr.,” Bellamy assured him. “They don’t wander that near to San Mariano.” After a brief pause, he added, “At least not usually.”

The cryptic way he said it made Clarke shiver. Perhaps it was just the cold starting to settle into her bones.

She looked up. The sky was puckered with stars. She could give up all the light of New York just for a slice of the Philippine sky. Thinking about New York made her think of Wells, and thinking about Wells made her feel anxious and numb so she shut out all other thoughts of home and instead focused on camp.

“Is that…” Jasper’s face brightened. “Is that the others I hear?”

Indeed there were voices floating up towards them, and a golden light shining through the breaks in the trees. Jasper started waving, his mouth half-open in a yell, when Bellamy suddenly moved – faster than Clarke would have expected – and pulled the three of them down with him into the bushes.

“What—” Clarke started, but Bellamy put his hand over his mouth and squeezed hard. The universal indicator for ‘shut up or we die.’

Clarke’s heart began to pound. Bellamy’s wrist pulse, where it rested against her cheek, was equally as loud. She could hear Finn’s harsh breathing somewhere to the left and Jasper’s soft mutterings, and then, just below that, the rough scrape of unfamiliar voices using unfamiliar words.

The owners of the voices were passing just up ahead. If Bellamy had wasted even a second, they would’ve seen the four of them. Judging by the seriousness of Bellamy’s face, she could tell these were not allies. In fact, she didn’t think Bellamy knew _what_ they were aside from the fact that his instinct had told him to get down and hide.

There were more or less ten of them, their voices overlapping, speaking in Tagalog. Clarke had only been in the Philippines a few months and had the most basic grasp of the Filipino’s language, but she caught familiar-enough words.

“Supremo,” and “Amerikano.” “Manila,” and “namatay.”

Bellamy’s mouth fell open slightly as he listened to their words. He was the only one of them who could understand what was being said, and apparently it was a story that Clarke didn’t want to hear.

“What’s going on?” Clarke dared. Bellamy’s hold on her had loosened just enough to let her whisper.

Bellamy’s eyes followed the path of the strangers’ torches through the forest until they were gone, and darkness fell again. He waited until their voices were drowned out by the insistent crickets, and then spoke, leaning against the tree behind them with exhaustion written all over his face.

“Your government had sent over an entire ship filled with reinforcements from the Navy,” Bellamy began. “Somehow, the Japs caught wind of it and waited for them at the bay. It was a bloodbath. They said the Americans were too surprised to even fight back. There were no survivors, judging by what they saw. So we’re alone again.”

 _The Navy?_ thought Clarke. And then, “Wells.”

“No,” Finn whispered. “No, don’t – don’t think like that, Clarke. Wells – maybe he got deployed somewhere else…”

But Clarke knew that if they had asked for soldiers to fight in the Philippines, Wells would’ve been the first volunteer. He would have been first on that ship sailing East. “Towards the sun,” he’d said when she and Finn had been deployed. “Don’t stop until you start to burn.”

 _Wells._ Clarke felt a sob building in her throat and fought to stamp it down. _Wells_. Damn him and his bravery, damn this entire bloody war. _Wells_. She didn’t fight so hard just to lose a piece of her heart now. _Wells_.

Her best friend, her greatest ally in the entire world. Wells Jaha.

Wells was gone.

“Clarke.” She looked up. Finn was kneeling beside her, her face in his hands. She hadn’t even realized that she’d started crying until Finn wiped her tears away with his knuckles. “Hey. Don’t worry. Wells is stronger than that. He wouldn’t go off and get himself killed right off the bat. And that’s only if he’d been on that ship—”

“You know he was.” Clarke shoved at him, suffocating on his forced positivity. She couldn’t handle him right now, couldn’t handle being held together when all she wanted to do was break apart and take everyone down with her. “You know he was!” she repeated. “You _know_ how he was, how he wanted to come and fight with us. You _know_ that if he had a chance, he would be here with us. You know he would be on the first boat out! ‘Towards the sun,’ remember? _Remember?_ ”

Finn’s face was weary. She felt hands on her shoulders and a quiet, “Calm down, princess. You’re going to get us all killed. Looks like you and Joe have a lot in common.”

 _Princess?_ Clarke thought wildly, spinning around to face Bellamy. “My best friend,” she said. Her own voice sounded foreign to her. “Wells. Wells Jaha—”

“We don’t know that,” Finn begged again, but her eyes were on Bellamy.

His face was carved of stone – grim and immovable. Clarke stepped back, wary of his sudden coldness and the tight set of his jaw.

“We’re near camp,” Bellamy said simply, and shouldered his way past them to lead the way again. Clarke didn’t understand the sudden shift of attitude, how a savior could pull away so fast and so soon.

But deities were always two-faced. Benevolent one moment, cold the next. And in these dense woods, the line between man and god were blurred. Clarke thought about the life lost, taken as if by some vengeful hand from a boy that was too young, and wondered if there was any line at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Salamat sa pagbasa! :D


End file.
